What you should know
- Some iPhone users on Reddit have reported that their alarms are not going off properly, with the alarm often going off without any sound.
- This issue is reportedly connected with Apple‘s ‘Attention Aware’ feature, which uses the TrueDepth camera to determine if you are paying attention to your iPhone and adjusts the volume of alerts accordingly.
- If the Attention Aware feature thinks the user is already awake, iPhones running iOS 17 may not play the alarm sound.
- Users experiencing this issue can try turning off the Attention Aware feature, turning off the Standby Mode, spacing out alarms, and sticking with the default alarm sound. If these solutions do not work, they may have to wait for Apple to roll out a fix.
Full Story
So when’s an excuse officially overused? Is it when folks across the globe fib about the same thing so often it starts to backfire? If that’s the case, then we’ve probably been pulling the ‘my iPhone alarm didn’t go off’ card way too often. Some folks on Reddit are griping that their alarms have gone silent. But hey, there are a few fixes floating around that seem to do the trick.
TechRadar was the first to report this. A Redditor by the name of overallxaverage posted about their alarm woes. They were curious if anyone else’s alarms were failing to go off as they should. “I usually set several sequential alarms, as you can see in this picture,” they wrote. “Only my alarm for 6:45 AM actually sounded, & I woke up to find that my earlier alarms had all remained “set” but failed to sound.”
Turns out, they weren’t alone. A common thread emerged: the iPhone alarm sometimes goes off without making a peep. This seems to happen most often to folks who set a bunch of alarms close together. One user, lost-cause2, shared their experience: “Set the alarm and then nothing happened at the time it should have gone off but it showed that it was still active. Puzzling.”
Another user, garuraa, added, “Sometimes the alarm screen is on but there is no sound.” Apparently, this is a glitch with iOS 17, specifically tied to Apple’s ‘Attention Aware’ feature.
One user claimed to have figured it out. “There is a feature called attention aware, and it doesn’t work,” they explained. “It thinks you are looking at the phone when the alarm goes off, so it silences it immediately. It’s ridiculous & it’s made me sleep through multiple school drop offs. Physical alarm is in the mail.”
The ‘Attention Aware’ feature uses the TrueDepth camera to determine if you’re paying attention to your iPhone. It then adjusts your phone’s behavior accordingly. For example, if it thinks you’re looking at your screen, it’ll lower the volume of alerts.
The problem is, iPhones running iOS 17 seem to mute the alarm sound when the Attention Aware feature thinks the user is already awake. If you’ve run into this issue, you might want to turn off Attention Aware. You can do this in the Accessibility settings or the Face ID & Attention menu.
If that doesn’t cut it, you could try turning off Standby Mode, spacing out your alarms, or sticking with the default alarm sound. As one user, letsdocraic, pointed out, “What can happen is if you have too many alarms going off they can overlap with alarms you snoozed which has a small chance to glitch them.”
But if none of these solutions do the trick and your iPhone alarm continues to stay silent, you might just have to wait for Apple to roll out a fix. In the meantime, you could always dust off that old alarm clock.
